Do Domo custom connectors support dynamic reports?

user11617

I'm super new to domo, so please excuse me if I'm missing something obvious...I'm looking into writing a custom connector, and I'm a bit stumped.  It does not seem that connectors have the ability to dynamically specify which "reports" they can support.  Is this true, or am I missing something?  It seems like within a report I can dynamically specify fields+types, but the reports themselves are static?  This is a bit of a problem when integrating with a system which has dynamically changing export data sets...or when different users have access to different reports - I'd rather not have to present all users with the superset of all available reports, where the majority of them would simply be empty for them (because they don't have access to that data)

dthierjung

I'm a little confused about your usage of the word "reports". Are you referring to datasets? Or the visualizations themselves (i.e. cards)?

 

A dataset should more or less remain static in that it has the same columns once it's put into production, (obviously development is a different story where things are likely to change often). If your datasets are dynamically changing, specifically the column definitions and not the row data, then from a Domo perspective it would make sense to have a dataset per exportable dataset.

 

Reason being is that at the card level, if you are using a column that disappears or changes at the next time the data updates, then your card will break.

 

Does that make sense? Happy to go into more detail if necessary.

user11617

sorry, I thought domo used the term "reports" ( https://developer.domo.com/docs/custom-connectors/configure-reports )...but yes, I'm referring to a single dataset, a single "table" if you will.  In my use case the schema of the tables (columns, data types) will not change, but *which tables* are available will be different for different users of the connector.  For any given user their available "tables" will be relatively static, but the list of available "tables" for 2 different users could be drastically different.

dthierjung

Oh interesting, you were right on, I didn't know about their naming conventions more custom connectors.

 

To answer your question then, as far as I know you cannot filter the available list of tables by user, the connector would present all options to them.

 

Now I'm not familiar with your organizational or data structure, but it could be beneficial to bring in the various datasets via the Domo Workbench and they would live as their own datasets. Then your users (assuming those specifically will be building cards/visualizations) can simply pull those datasets as needed without needing to setup additional connections details. 

 

And this approach would help centralize and control how the data is being brought in to your instance, at what interval, and provide more visibility/logs around data updates, plus alerts if it fails to update.